The ex-Marine.

They had a three week eastern patrol over towards the Algerian border.
We've all seen the documentaries.
The relentless, blinding heat.  Wind that strips skin and turns bone to something beautiful and hypnotic.
But the way Eddy told it to me made all of this hellish exotica sound painfully ordinary.
Eddy was my age then.  Only I was twenty two and he was twenty two going on one hundred.
We were drinking champagne that someone had stolen from out the back of a restaurant.  Taking long and careless swigs straight from the bottle.
He thought it'd be fun to join the French Foreign Legion.
So he joined
and found out it was not fun.
Eddy found himself  squadding with former mercenaries, ex-regulars disenchanted by the peacable efforts of their respective sovereign armies, active heroin users, cuckolded husbands and jilted lovers and spiritually crippled alcoholics who would scream in the night at the insects trying to eat them alive- imagined or otherwise.
Three weeks of endless heat, sand and toxic, shimmering horizons.
He even saw a large scorpion one afternoon.  A big and fearless black one that scuttle-charged foolishly at a former Chinese People's Army 'adviser' who had developed an insatiable taste for all things lost cause. The guy just stepped on the fucking thing until it stopped moving which wasn't as long as some people might think.
All that marching.  All that sun.  All that wind and sand must really takes its toll on the body because midway into the final week, they were marching two abreast (seriously Algerian separatists??? Not. A. Fucking. Chance. We'd. Catch. Sight. Of. One. In. Butt. Fuck. North. Africa.)
And they're marching and the afternoon had rolled around and not too far ahead there's a sudden halt in the line.
This giant of a man - an ex-Marine - had collapsed.  Mid forties, face like a bat's folded wing.  All floppy and vein and bone from years of alcohol, sixty Ducados a day and an irrational hatred of boredom on civvy street.
He collapsed and started lazily flopping there on the side of an endless dune.  Eddy made his way through all that brutal and unloved soldiery.  All the different languages.  All the different skin tones.  All the competing ideological rivalries.  All the non-comprehending or simply uncaring looks.
Eddy knelt beside this man and moved his ear down to a mouth that moved up and down mechanically, fish-like.
And this giant, this veteran of foreign wars and grand and futile adventures whispered through cyanotic lips, "Cigarette.  Fucking cigarette."
Eddy fumbled.  Lit one.  Shoved it in the guy's mouth and ten minutes later they were back on patrol, for all the world like nothing had happened.
One man's poison etc etc.
After that there was nothing to say so we just stared out at the sun setting over Juan-Les-Pins passing that bottle back and forth.

Swan Swan H